The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer and providing convenience to users.
Concurrent with the expansion of networking technologies, an expansion in computing power has resulted in development of affordable computing devices capable of taking advantage of services made possible by modern networking technologies. This expansion in computing power has led to a reduction in the size of computing devices and given rise to a new generation of mobile devices that are capable of performing functionality that only a few years ago required processing power that could be provided only by the most advanced desktop computers. Consequently, mobile computing devices having a small form factor have become ubiquitous and are used to access network applications and services by consumers of all socioeconomic backgrounds, and are used to communicate with other devices over mobile networks at a variety of locations.
Given the power and ubiquity of mobile computing devices, mobile computing devices now consume a large amount of network bandwidth, placing a burden on bandwidth-limited cellular networks. As the burden on cellular networks of handling the large data demands of modern mobile computing devices has grown and as network operators charge increasing data rates for data transfer on cellular networks, network operators and consumers have increasingly turned to a technology called “offloading” in order to reduce the network load burden on cellular networks and to reduce data costs charged to consumers. Offloading takes advantage of dual-mode communication devices that are capable of accessing a network via both a cellular access and a secondary access, such as a wireless local area network (WLAN) access, to send data over a network access other than the cellular network access when an alternative access is available to a mobile computing device.